characteristics, price and technical sheet

With all of you, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. We are facing the first chips of a line of mobile processors that pose a notable leap compared to the past Snapdragon 888 in various fields and that want to once again become the heart of the most powerful Android phones on the market.

There are several important novelties in these new SoCs, but one of the most striking is the leap to 4 nanometer photolithography, which will improve both efficiency and performance in all areas. At Qualcomm, however, they raise the ante in two areas: artificial intelligence —Hand her Hexagon processor— and mobile photography.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 spec sheet

Qualcomm turns the page. It does so at least in the field of the nomenclature of its processors, which until now had followed a more or less predictable numerical sequence and now adopt a new formula for their denomination.

The new SoCs Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (SM8450) come armed to the teeth of technology, and the improvements will be noticed in all the sections: from the general and graphical performance to the connectivity or, of course, the tasks of artificial intelligence and mobile photography and video.

More artificial intelligence …

The new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 stand out in the first place for that new Hexagon processor that wins integers and that according to Qualcomm makes possible achieve four times the performance in artificial intelligence tasks such as those that, for example, are applied in computational photography.

The SoC also has the so-called third-generation Sensing Hub and the double the performance both in acceleration of the Tensor cores of the processor as in the memory used in these processes. All this with an efficiency 1.7 times higher than the previous generation.

This commitment to artificial intelligence will be noticed, for example, in the support of the ArcSoft’s ‘AI Video Bokeh’ technology that will allow mobiles with this chip to have that “cinema mode” that the last iPhone promoted. There have also been collaborations with Ernst Leitz Labs, who work in computational photography and that will allow users of these chips to benefit from these advantages, for example when using Leika’s integrated filters to recreate the bokeh and color of these cameras.

There is even support for other striking proposals such as the support of Sonde’s ‘mental fitness’, a company that claims to be capable from monitor our mental health and well-being through our voice.

Support is also provided for Hugging Face, a natural language recognition system based on artificial intelligence that is capable of analyzing and grouping / prioritizing our notifications.

… and more mobile photography than ever

Another of the key sections in which Qualcomm dedicates resources with these Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is that of mobile photography. Thanks to the benefits of these chips, mobile manufacturers will be able to provide their camera devices with very striking features, such as the possibility of take 240 12-megapixel photos in one second.

In fact, 3.2 Gigapixels per second can be processed, and we also have an “ultra-wide-angle motor” that will correct the typical defects of those imagessuch as chromatic aberration or warping at the ends.

Snapdragon Sight technology allows you to have not one, but three 18-bit ISPs that allow you to manage more data than ever even in RAW mode, and in Qualcomm they promise 5 times more precise night modes (30 images are captured to achieve the final composition, before six were captured), in addition to the 8K HDR video recording and the aforementioned dedicated bokeh engine in video shots.

That’s not all folks

There are other areas in which Qualcomm promises notable improvements, and one of them is that of video games, which thanks to the Snapdragon Elite Gaming system will benefit from better touch sampling rates, higher quality in HDR support and support of frame rates that can reach 144 FPS in some games.

This manufacturer has teamed up with Unity and Unreal Engine, and the new Adreno Frame Motion Engine built into the SOC’s GPU enables more frames per second with lower power consumption.

According to Qualcomm performance improvement of Adreno graphics cores reaches 30% improving efficiency by 25% – Kryo cores are now 20% faster improving consumption by 30% – and we will have features such as volumetric rendering and a complete control panel to control all the graphic options that the chip can offer.

Connectivity is strengthened with the 5G modem (the Snapdragon X65) capable of transfer rates of up to 10 Gbps, and we have Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E support. In the sound section, the CD Lossless and Bluetooth LE Audio support stand out.

Now it only remains to see how this SoC behaves, something that we can foreseeably see in a few weeks: The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will undoubtedly be the protagonist in many of the high-end Android phones in 2022. It will be then when these new chips will be able to demonstrate if all these promises are translated into facts.

More information | Qualcomm